Getting the list of included patterns

I have been asked if I would have a go at creating a materials editor like my thread editor and I am willing to give it a go. I have had a look and I would like to be able to have a list of available material patterns to be selected from a dropbox. I am also working on being able to graphically create a pattern as well, which will be added to the custom pattern file.

So my question is this. How do I access the list of built in patterns?

I know basic VB so any help will have to be quite explicit on how to go about it.

Yes I am referring to Hatch patterns. A material spec includes the name of the hatch pattern used for it in drawings and I want a new material spec to be able to select the relevant hatch pattern from a list.

Yes I am referring to Hatch patterns. A material spec includes the name of the hatch pattern used for it in drawings and I want a new material spec to be able to select the relevant hatch pattern from a list.

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Unfortunately the "association" of Hatch Patterns within the Material ID is limited to those Hatch Patterns that ar hard coded into Alibre. They are all based upon the travesty created by John Walker when the State of California was "underwriting" his efforts. I know of no way around this.

Yeah I did some pretty deep searches for "Houndstooth" (seemed pretty esoteric) and came to this conclusion.

The custom .mtl file is adamant that all custom materials "SHOULD" reference hatching patterns contained in the custom .pat file.

We are somewhat lucky that other, let's say 3rd party's, do not have hard coded .pat files, and that these, lucky for us, meet our formatting requirements. They just need to be concatenated as the files are separated into standards. This might be possible in one line of code, but I kinda suck at python so I'm assuming it will take me a few more.

Licensing of these files is a little more icky.

If y'all wanna try this editor let me know. I haven't bothered looking into making it an "add-on" yet as I read somewhere that Alibre needs to be restarted to detect changes in the custom material file so, atleast for my purposes anyway, it's kind of moot.

Im exporting as "<material class> (custom)" (I may make this a variable parameter later) but for the sake of compatibility with people's existing libraries, it might help to know how others are formatting this.